Imagine a panoramic photograph with such high resolution that you could zoom in on a postage stamp more than half a mile away, or read signs that are blocks away from your vantage point. That is just what researchers at Duke University have created.

Shortly after a rat infested supply ship ran around in Lord Howe Island off the east coast of Australia in 1918, the newly introduced mammals wiped out the island's phasmids—stick insects the size of a human hand.